EVERY institution of any age has its legends, and the C.U.M.C. is no exception. Indeed, dating back, as it does, well into the " pre-last war " period, and having a gap of several years in its history, during the war period, when, incidentally, its written records were lost, it is singularly well placed to have them. While, however, other institutions may make of their legends a source of legitimate pride, when we see our own seriously quoted, from our own columns, we hasten to admit, the time has clearly come to dissipate the myth. The club has therefore every reason to be grateful to Geoffrey Winthrop Young, the president of the Alpine Club, for establishing its true early history and placing with it the documentation and his own record, upon which the following account is based, and is here published for the first time.
The Revd. A. Valentine Richards, dean of Christ’s, was a very good and generous friend to the C.U.M.C. after his return to Cambridge as a don. His memory was, however, fallible. At the meeting summoned to reconstitute the club after the war, in 1920, he made a statement, vaguely reported and rather diffidently inserted in the new minute book; and he appears to have amplified this orally. to members of the club not long before his death, in 1934. It is this statement which found its way into an article in our 1922 Journal and into the editorial of the 1934 Journal, whence it has been copied by the Alpine Journal, the American Alpine Journal, etc.; and so the legend began.
It ran as follows: the dub was founded in 1883, its foundation being " largely due" to Mr. Valentine Richards; and it was confined at first to Trinity College, and later extended to include members of other colleges. We are left to assume that it was never known as anything but the C.U.M.C., a University club. The 1934 Journal also contains Mr. Valentine Richards’ obituary. From this we learn that he came up from Shrewsbury to Christ’s in 1885; and, therefore, that while a boy of, say, sixteen, at school, he was "largely responsible" for the starting in Trinity College of a club for undergraduates of that college, to which he would seem to have little prospect of belonging himself when he should come up two years later to Christ’s! Among these contradictions, the date 1883 may perhaps have suggested itself in order to allow time for the club to develop, out of an exclusively Trinity one, into one which would allow of Mr. Valentine Richards’ belonging to it in 1885. But in meeting one difficulty, the suggestion involves .html contradiction, in that it renders it wholly impossible for Mr. Richards to have been in any degree responsible for the founding of the club. Our predecessors, in publishing these inconsistencies, missed an engaging opportunity of evolving a "Little Saint Valentine" as the boy-founder of the club.
Further, Geoffrey Winthrop Young came up himself to Trinity in 1894, and there came to know every past and present Cambridge mountaineer, from the pioneer generation onwards. Not one of them had ever heard of such a dub, much less belonged to it, attended a meeting, or come down to lecture to it. In fact, no other member of such a club has ever been traced or heard of. Moreover, until the spread of English climbing, which did not come until the turn of the century, such a club could not, by the nature of things, have been started or maintained among undergraduates. Mountaineering before that meant only Alpine mountaineering: very few undergraduates could afford to go to the Alps; and none would have dreamed that his " experience " was sufficient to talk about in public or to ground a club upon. Indeed, after 1900, Mr. Young was in correspondence with Charles Sayle, the popular assistant University Librarian, who had helped to found the English Climbers’ Club in 1899, about the possibility of starting a club in Cambridge as a branch of the E.C.C,; and the latter stated definitely as a result of a discussion between officials of the E.C.C. and the few undergraduate climbers in residence, that he thought the time was not yet ripe and the University not ready even then. Mr. Young assisted in starting the English Climbers’ Club in 1899, the Cambridge University Alpine Club in 1910, and the Oxford University Mountaineering Club in 1912, and in his view the C.U.M.C. was in fact founded at the very earliest moment at which such an organisation among undergraduates became practicably possible. The doubts which he felt even in 1906 were borne out by its rather frail life; till it flickered out in 1914. It has required the changed attitude to climbing, and the altered social conditions after the last war, to enable its vigorous existence since.
To come now to the facts. The Cambridge University Mountaineering Club was founded – under that name – during the winter months of 1905-1906. It was founded by Hugh Stewart and W. J. R. Calvert, both of whom were scholars of Trinity College. The list of original members, so far as it can be reconstructed from old letters and menus, seems to have included: – W. J. R. Calvert (first President), Hugh Stewart (first Hon. Secretary), H. B. Pilkington, E. F. Pilkington, C. R. Barran, H. C. Wilkinson, (all of Trinity), J. G. Drummond (of Christ’s), A. H. Ramsay (of Pembroke), and N. L. Cappell. In addition, the following were present at the first annual dinner: – J. W. Reynolds, F. W. Hubback, W. B. S. Angus, R. H, Verney, W. P. Hulton, F. A; Powell, C. C. Kerby, G. B. Lloyd and C. A. Tower (or Jones?); and at the second annual dinner: – R. C. Lundie, P. Haslehurst, E. C. Rayner, J. H. Mandleburg and W. McMaster(P): and of these no doubt a number were also members. The first lecture was given by Sir Martin Conway, as he then was, on February 14th, 1906; and he was afterwards entertained to dinner by the club in A. H. Ramsay’s rooms. There had however been less formal meetings before this, and at the first, which was probably in December, 1905, Calvert read a paper on the Alps, where he had already had some experience. The second lecturer from outside the club was W. Cecil Slingsby; and the third, in the autumn of 1906, was G. Winthrop Young. The first annual dinner took place on May 19th, 1906; and the second, on May 1st, 1907. The guest and speaker at the second was the Revd. L. S. Calvert, W. R. Calvert’s father, a well-known mountaineer, and member of the Alpine Club. Menus from both these dinners have now been presented to the Club by one of the original members, E. F. Pilkington, who was himself son of the great Alpine pioneer Charles Pilkington, and father of our recent Hon. Secretary, Charles Pilkington. They are of interest apart from their historical value and that of the signatures they carry. That of the second dinner was in French and decorated with a coloured photograph of the Piz Rosegg, suggesting the growing prosperity of the club; and Hugh Stewart, the Hon. Secretary, signs his name with a spirited flourish, evidently rejoiced at the success of the venture. Included on the menu on both occasions were salmon, whitebait, roast lamb, asparagus and chocolate soufflé; the repetition witnesses to the Hon. Secretary’s preferences!
Of meets in these early days we have no record. There were then no Youth Hostels or climbing club huts, and organised meets as we know them would probably have been very difficult to arrange; especially while English climbing was still some- thing of a novelty, and the ambitions of all serious members fixed on the Alps. It would appear that at this stage the club did no more in this direction than enable young climbers to get to know each other, leaving the actual climbing parties to be privately arranged. The encouragement ’ and assistance which the dub received from senior members, then as now, was invaluable, and without it the club could probably not have existed at all.
During the war, as related, the club activities ceased. Kenneth Tallerman, now Colonel Tallerman, R.A.M.C., was the last Hon. Sec. to be elected, in August, 1914, the appointment to take effect in October. He relates that at this time the club met regularly in Mr. Valentine Richards’ rooms in Christ’s, coffee and biscuits being provided, and it remained a purely undergraduate dub, although as’ far as he recollects Mr. Richards seemed to be acting as president. On the outbreak of war, however, both Tallerman and C. G. Crawford, the out-going secretary, later Himalayan and Everest explorer, left for the front; the minute books, or book, were never transferred, and disappeared; and from this confusion has arisen our ignorance of the early history of the club, and its substituted legend.
After the war, the club was completely reconstituted, largely on the initiative of C. A. Elliot, tutor of Jesus, Alpine Club member, and now headmaster of Eton, and of Mr. Valentine Richards. Among the undergraduates, George Metcalfe, of Jesus, took a leading part. The club passed through a number of rapid constitutional changes, including a brief interlude when there were some lady members, and emerged much in its present form; its active officers drawn from undergraduates, with continuity and tradition safeguarded by a small committee of older resident mountaineers. W. T. Elmslie, of Westminster College, the Ellwood brothers, and the Wigrams, rebuilt the tradition. In the later twenties, the dynamic and charming personality of van Noorden, of Clare, with his friend Wyn Harris, the Everest climber and Kenya commissioner, presided over a period of brilliant development; which, later, gave to Cambridge a representation in the exploring and Himalayan fields as worthy as in the opening up of the Alps by the pioneering generation. To this period belongs Gino Watkins, the greatest of all undergraduate explorers, not only for his outstanding achievements, but also for his contributions to the progress of exploration as a whole. He demonstrated the art of leadership brought to a far higher pitch than had ever been attained by the "semi-military" organisation of previous expeditions; and the supreme art of living off a country, even through the Arctic winter, in the same manner as its native inhabitants. Thus he was probably the first Englishman to learn how to handle a kayak, and he successfully undertook sledge journeys of unprecedented length. Besides exploration and mountaineering, he was greatly interested in the development of flying, and one of his expeditions was made with the object of surveying a projected Arctic air route. He led his first expedition at the age of nineteen, and his last at the age of twenty-two, while still an undergraduate. To this period also belong the explorers and mountaineers Longland, Peter Lloyd, the Wagers; the Bicknells, Spencer Chapman, the Wakefields, Ted Hicks, Tony Dummett, Robert Chew, the Trevelyan cousins; and Eric Shipton only missed being with them because of a misunderstanding with a master of a College about the uses of Geology. The Winthrop Young house in Bene’t Place was the rallying point for the generation.
The first club meet, apart from any there may have been before the war, took place at Ogwen, in the Easter vacation of r gag. Half the party stayed at Ogwen Cottage, and half camped nearby. The weather was bad, but nevertheless a good deal of climbing was done, mostly on Tryfan, and everyone in the party went round the Snowdon horseshoe. Several members of the party were complete beginners, and the first day was devoted entirely to the Milestone Buttress, for their benefit.
The first C.U.M.C. meet in the Alps was held in the summer of the same year, at Les Evettes, under the leadership of Mr. L. A. Ellwood, then president of the club, and it appears that it was entirely owing to his initiative and enthusiasm that the meet was held. It is evident from the earlier numbers of " Oxford and Cambridge Mountaineering" that members of the club had been climbing in the Alps during previous seasons, but the meet gave this opportunity to many who could not otherwise possibly have afforded it. Mr. Ellwood took infinite pains over the organisation of every detail of the journey, and finally provided a month’s mountaineering in the Alps at a total cost, including fares, of under £20 a head. As a fitting reward for his labours, the meet was blessed with perfect weather, there being only two wet days in the whole month. As the figure just cited will suggest, no guides were employed; and the precedent of guideless climbing thus set up has been followed more or less faithfully at club meets ever since. Since 1911 the Charles Donald Robertson Fund, established in memory of a notable mountaineer and fellow of Trinity, who was killed on Glyder Fach, has assisted towards the expenses of mountain holidays: special grants, from associated funds in memory of Charles Edward Matthews and George Leigh-Mallory, being allocated to climbing.
A new departure in the summer of 1932 was a meet in Norway; the reason given for the idea in the official account of the meet being that at that time the pound was worth only fifteen shillings, in Switzerland, but twenty-two shillings in Norway. Elsewhere in the same account it is mentioned that six of the party of ten were Scotsmen. The meet was highly successful, and among other things the catering arrangements at Norwegian hotels came in for much praise. At Easter, the following year, there was .html new venture, in the shape of a ski-mountaineering meet in the Bernese Oberland, also a great success. The weather was good, but conditions were not perfect in that snow was scarce that year, which increased the difficulty of the glaciers and left the tops icy. True to the best traditions, the party was guideless. As it was nine in number, and most of its members had had a fair amount of experience of skiing, this did not provide a source of anxiety. It is greatly to be hoped that when such things are again possible, there will be more meets on these ambitious and out-of-the-ordinary lines. There is now less danger than there was in the thirties of skiing and mountaineering being regarded as distinct interests, and of the skiers as such swamping the mountaineering element. Skiing has now become a recognised branch of greater mountaineering.
And so we come to the present day. The writing of its history must be left to later authors; suffice to say that of the time of the second world war, unlike that of the first, there will be some history to write; indeed, far from flickering out, as in 1914, and in spite of the short time in which present-day members can gather experience before they must leave the club, the C.U.M.C. to-day is as active and enthusiastic as ever. As it is hoped that this journal will show.